The E-Science Portal at Imperial College is a London e-Science Centre (LeSC) project funded by the Department of Trade and Industry and being undertaken in collaboration with Sun Microsystems. The project's long-term goal is for EPIC to be used by e-scientists both inside and outside Imperial College London as part of their everyday working lives. This collaboration with Sun Microsystems has been enhanced and strengthened by LeSC being recognised as a Sun Centre of Excellence in e-Science.

Grid Infrastructure

The Grid infrastructure being deployed across LeSC's heterogeneous computational resources is using open source software such as Globus, Sun Grid Engine and Sun Grid Engine Enterprise Edition, alongside closed source software such as Condor and Quadric's Resource Management System (RMS). This deployment encompasses a variety of architectures (SPARC, Intel, AMD & Alpha) and operating systems (Solaris, Linux & Tru64). We are now examining how this 'Campus Grid' deployment can be linked to other Sun Grid Engine instances within other organisations.

An integration between Sun Grid Engine editions and the Globus Toolkit has been undertaken by this project, details of which are available here.

E-Science Portal

The e-science portal is being built using the open source uPortal infrastructure which provides mechanisms for session management and layout. Within the portal we have been developing and deploying 'channels' to support the e-scientist that are accessible through a secure identification mechanism using Globus compatible X.509 public key certificates.

e-Science Portal at Imperial College - Bookmarks

e-Science Portal at Imperial College - Email

e-Science Portal at Imperial College - Submarine App

These currently include:

• The Grid Portal (previously the Technical Compute Portal - TCP) which provides web based access to the Sun's Grid Engine Infrastructure.
• Bookmark and email channels to provide an identical 'desktop' environment from any device.
• Submarine design application that is being used to motivate high throughput computing issues.

Web services, built on industry standard protocols such as XML, SOAP, WSDL and UDDI, are becoming integral to emerging Grid infrastructures. LeSC has developed an initial prototype of a Job Description Markup Language (JDML) to encapsulate the information needed to submit a job to a distributed resource manager. A Job Submission service that consumes JDML is being developed within ICENI (Imperial College e-Science Networked Infrastructure) for deployment as an Open Grid Services Architecture compatible web service available to any network connected client.

Effective Job Deployment

Being able to submit a job from a networked client to a Job Submission service requires that the placement of such jobs can be optimised over available Grid resources. This takes place through a 'super-scheduler' that matches the job to the resource s capabilities and constraints. Such a scheduling framework is already under development within the Centre's own Grid middleware ICENI and is being deployed across the Centre's Grid resources before being integrated into EPIC.

The Sun Grid Portal (formally known as the Technical Compute Portal - TCP) within EPIC